Stitch the Fragments: One-Shot Hierarchical Federated Clustering

Excerpt

arXiv:2601.06404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Clustering (FC) faces a critical bottleneck in real-world scenarios, i.e., global clusters are rarely intact, often fragmenting into incomplete, multi-granular unlabeled ``clusterlets'' distributed across Non-IID clients. Although hierarchical clustering is theoretically well-suited to model such nested distributions, its recursive nature strictly relies on multi-round communication, introducing prohibitive computational overhead and